Testing Services provides a platform for QA professionals to discuss and gain insights in to the business value delivered by testing, the best practices and processes that drive it and the emergence of new technologies that will shape the future of this profession.

June 13, 2012

With reduced investments in IT and the constant pressure to reduce costs, IT teams have been looking for innovative ways to improve efficiencies, reduce re-work and optimize operations. This is where an organizations capability to ensure and control quality of their complex IT ecosystems is becoming very critical. Further, this has necessitated that QA organizations evaluate their processes and capabilities in delivering quality. Test Maturity Models were developed to enable the assessment of current testing capabilities and processes. Over the years, several such models were developed and many have been re-defined several times to catch up with the needs of the market. But majority of the models ended up being rigid and certification oriented while the industry was looking for a comprehensive test maturity model that could be customized, adapted and facilitated the improvement of testing capabilities selectively. Such a model is more relevant as more and more companies were adopting global sourcing models and their capabilities to deliver was not limited to one organization, but collective capabilities of several organizations.

In my latest POV co-authored along with Aromal Mohan I discuss and help understand "The Enterprise QA Transformation Model" which has been developed to provide a framework that will evaluate the current testing capabilities of an organization and provide a reference framework for their improvement. It is a continuous model that helps in selectively strengthening the required capabilities, thus making the improvements more relevant to the model, in which the organization operates. To know more please click here http://www.infosys.com/IT-services/independent-validation-testing-services/white-papers/Documents/enterprise-QA-transformation-model.pdf. I look forward to your comments and feedback.

June 6, 2012

While interacting with a stakeholder who wanted to move his production website from its existing physical infrastructure onto a private cloud, I understood that his primary focus was to leverage cloud from an infrastructure standpoint, which would potentially involve configuration changes for capacity planning. There were no changes being made to the code or the architecture of the particular website. In such scenarios, cloud migration testing is essential for the websites involved, to ensure that the websites performance, functional flow, data and access control security privileges remains intact.

The most critical aspect of cloud migration testing is performance. It's necessary to confirm that the performance of the website is unaffected or improves when compared to its earlier performance in the physical infrastructure. The performance would also need to be validated from a capacity planning perspective. Real life transaction load simulations would need to be an essential element of the performance testing at the back-end, middleware level than at the user interface level.

After the Website is migrated to the cloud, a validation to ensure that the functional flows and data remains intact, along with a simultaneous data migration validation from the physical to the cloud infrastructure needs to be implemented. The data migration validation can be carried out using database toolsets like comparing the database volume sizes, record counts and performing random data tests. Lastly, a security validation that takes into account the access control, privileges, etc. would need be a part of the Cloud Migration Test strategy.